SMOR Survey Says Jindal’s On The Rebound, Vitter Pounds Mitch In 2015

Nothing particularly earth-shattering here, though the Jindal and Vitter camps will both likely be encouraged by what they see.

First, the Governor has apparently come back from the depths of his troubles and is now approaching even-money with the voters on approval ratings…

The “excellents” only sitting at 14 percent aren’t very good, but a 47.7 percent approval rating for a governor in his 7th year is about as high as one can imagine. How high was Mike Foster in 1998? In the last 30 years Foster was the only governor to even get as far as a 7th year in office; Dave Treen, Edwin Edwards (1987), Buddy Roemer, Edwin Edwards (1995) and Kathleen Blanco couldn’t even get re-elected.

Under those circumstances Jindal can say he should get some credit for having done something right. And with Louisiana’s economy seemingly humming along and some of his policy reforms bearing fruit, he has reason to think he’ll leave office with even better numbers than this.

An interesting graph from the SMOR release…

The poll also took a look at the 2015 governor’s race, throwing all the likely candidates into a pot – except for Jim Bernhard – and here’s what they found…

Interestingly, Kennedy is ahead of Dardenne. That’s something which shows up as often as not, though it seems a bit counterintuitive.

Should both Kennedy and Dardenne get in the race, you can bank on the fact that there will be a Democrat in the runoff with Vitter – whether that Democrat turns out to be Edwards, Bernhard or Mitch Landrieu. This poll would serve to confirm that.

A negative for Vitter: the Republican non-Vitter vote in the jungle primary SMOR is testing (26.0 percent) is nearly as big as the Vitter vote (28.9 percent) is. That would suggest if Vitter ends up in a runoff against Dardenne or Kennedy he could have some trouble.

Which has been the conventional wisdom for quite some time.

But in this poll, Landrieu runs even with Vitter in the primary. Then, in a runoff between the two, we have this…

Not quite the 60-40 margin some think Vitter could get against Landrieu, but it’s enough to win.